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Overview
Herein, Nathan Ward tells the original Mob story, "revealing a spiderweb of union corruption and outright gangsterism....His story has everything" (New York Sun), making Dark Harbor a modern true crime classic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312569341 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 05/24/2011 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 703,402 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PREFACE: WHO WANTS TO BE A DEAD HERO?
“Oh, I know what you want to hear about,” Jim Longhi said with
false reluctance the first time I called him, interrupting a chess
game with his wife, Gabrielle. “The old waterfront—gangsters,
rackets, the Anastasias.”
He was right. My interest in what Mr. Longhi elegantly called
the “criminal coloration” of the docks was what had brought us
together. Longhi was a cultured Manhattan attorney on the threshold
of his nineties when we met in his cheerful apartment on Sutton
Place one summer afternoon. He had just removed his work tie
from the collar of his silk shirt as he led me out onto his small balcony.
Below us and a few hundred yards away was the East River, a
pretty staid thoroughfare at that point in its life compared to the
rough old waterfront I had come to hear about, and Mr. Longhi
weighed the calm barge traffic he saw against the river in his head.
“A very different waterfront,” he judged. As we talked about his
early days, the suave manners of the Columbia- educated attorney
loosened a bit, following his tie, revealing a son of the Brooklyn
docks. Longhi’s father had been a radical docks organizer (“When
I was born, my father had seven bodyguards, seven Italians with
ice picks!”), and he had started out himself as a waterfront lawyer
like Mr. Alfieri, the character his friend Arthur Miller modeled on
him for A View from the Bridge. We spent some wonderful hours
among his memories of one friend’s dangerous feud with “Tough
Tony” Anastasio or another whose longshore activism had dropped
off after “they broke his legs.” This was the world I was after.
I’d first become interested in the waterfront when I lived in
South Brooklyn, in a brownstone owned by an old Italian longshoreman
with missing fingers. Ships would occasionally appear at
the end of my street, to be unloaded or repaired or sent off with a
burst of nighttime fireworks. I grew familiar with the tug and ferry
horns and watched the sunset flights of pigeons that zagged around
the rooftops, much as in the famous Brando movie. But I knew
almost nothing about the old days until I happened across a reference
to a 1940s newspaper series on waterfront gangsterism. It had
run for twenty- four days—an extraordinary amount of space to give
to any subject then, let alone to the lowly docks—and caused a
national scandal; could the piers really have been as brutal as they
looked in the movies?
When I met Jim Longhi again it was in his law offices on lower
Broadway and he was wearing a beautiful brown suit. The high
windows looked across to the old New York Sun building and beyond
to another waterfront, busy with beautifications. On a distant
pier by the Brooklyn Bridge, where Longhi remembered watching
desperate men fight a hook- swinging riot, a new riverside playground
was being dug. We sat for an hour talking about some
valiant old causes and vivid, long- dead thugs of the harbor.
Months before he died, I called Mr. Longhi once more at his
office with a foolishly cinematic idea: to take my ninety- year- old
friend out on a boat and tour the harbor, perhaps starting at the
Narrows and hugging the shoreline to see what he remembered,
pier by vestigial pier; Longhi would narrate as he drifted around
the city, recalling who had owned what or done what to whom.
(“You say, ‘Mafia,’ and it’s provincial,” he had told me. “You say,
‘Mob,’ and it extends way beyond the Italian underworld.”)
The small tour boat Geraldina was ready to pick us up, her captain,
herself a historian of the harbor, eagerly standing by with a
video camera and microphone to capture the floating lecture. I then
called Mr. Longhi to ease any remaining old- guy concerns about
the trip, describing the level, relatively uncomplicated Chelsea
dock (with an outdoor bar) where we imagined him stepping aboard
after a steadying cocktail. He listened to my pitch, then paused
and sighed into the phone. “It kind of sounds like a pain in the
ass,” he said at last. “I have my own picture of where everything
was in my mind. I don’t need to see the waterfront today to tell me
that.”
Seeing it today would indeed muddle things. At the edge of the
Erie Basin, a ferry service lures visitors from Manhattan to a giant
IKEA store that sits among the relics of the Brooklyn industrial
waterfront. The store has a large upstairs cafeteria where, after a
long afternoon touring housewares and furniture kits, you can eat
Swedish meatballs and watch the sun lengthen across the car park,
paved over a deep old dry dock that once held warships.
For decades, much of the abandoned waterfront was walled off
by empty pier sheds. There was a forlorn beauty to the slow dilapidation,
even if the water was blocked by a kind of ghost town. Many
old sheds have since been flattened into parks; a trapeze school
now sits atop Chelsea’s Pier 40 building, and swinging out over the
Hudson River waterfront, you have a clear downtown view uncluttered
by slings or crates or Hi- Lo trucks. Looking out from the
promenade that overhangs the expressway in Brooklyn Heights,
you see a rotting wet railroad pier, all that remains here from Jim
Longhi’s time, the dark planking and rail track punctuated by
shrubs that grow in green tufts; large concrete piers, recently
cleared of their cargo sheds for park space, surround the ruin,
which has been retained among the planned ice rink, new ballfields,
and condominia pushing south from the bridges and toward
the hugely still gantry cranes of the Red Hook Marine Terminal.
Beyond the cranes sits the boxy white- brick headquarters of the
Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, established in the
fifties to mind the gangsters on the docks and recently folded into
Homeland Security.
The harbor Mr. Longhi kept in his head was the world’s greatest
port, a collection of bays rimmed with more than nine hundred
piers and noisily crowded with hundreds of express liners,
freighters, ferries, lighters, garbage scows, car floats, battleships,
yachts, floating elevators, coffee barges, and constantly whistling
tugs. The Hudson was still known as the North River (to distinguish
it from the Delaware, or South River) along its length from
the Battery, where freighters often lined up for their tug escorts, to
the deep Midtown piers. This book is about that old waterfront, and
its “criminal coloration,” where money washed in and out, and
graft mingled the longshore union with the racketeers.
Touring the harbor today, it is hard to imagine these quiet
frontages of rot and renewal ever knowing such a fearful time that a
reporter could write, “It has been said, and with some justification
that the waterfront of New York produces more murders to the
square foot than does any other one section of the country. Most
such murders go unsolved.” In fact, in 1948, the year the shooting
of a young boss stevedore brought reporter Malcolm “Mike” Johnson
of the New York Sun to the West Side docks, the Manhattan district
attorney claimed there’d been at least two dozen unsolved
waterfront murders since 1919. Johnson soon learned that snaking
around the watery edges of his town was a very different city. “Murder
on the waterfront is commonplace,” he wrote, “a logical product
of widespread gangsterism.”
I have tried my best to evoke the dock world the longshoremen
knew long before the newspapers discovered it. But at its heart,
this is a reporter’s story. If Mike Johnson’s sleuthing along the
docks has a hardboiled familiarity, echoing any number of later
Mob tales involving hoods and rackets and an intrepid investigator,
it is because his was the original—creating the Mob investigation
form that runs from On the Waterfront to The Valachi Papers and
Donnie Brasco. Johnson’s discovery of what he called a “waterfront
jungle” is also the story of a clash of New York institutions—a fading
newspaper, backing its unshakable veteran star reporter; the
Mob, near the height of its influence, whose leaders had largely
come to power and of age during Prohibition; and the longshore
union and the pugnacious survivor at its helm, “president- for- life”
Joseph Ryan.
“One of the constantly astounding things about New York is that
it can endure so much crime and corruption and still manage to get
on,” the New York Herald Tribune editorialized during the waterfront
scandals. Indeed, the city had “gotten on” for several decades
under an imaginary bargain, despite the occasional alarms raised
by citizens’ groups about port corruption and the bodies that turned
up from month to month, deposited by what newspapers obtusely
called the “dock wars.” New Yorkers were aware that gangsters
shared their town, primarily robbing and shooting one another and
running the better nightclubs but never holding the reins completely
as they had in Chicago. For many, their city’s sinful reputation
was the price of cosmopolitanism.
Reporters had toured the waterfront before Mike Johnson,
dabbling in its rough atmosphere and lore as the movies did—as a
setting for brawls and deals or other seamy behavior beyond the
edge of society. Investigating the deaths of some twenty- one stevedores
in Brooklyn’s Irishtown neighborhood, The New Yorker’s Alva
Johnston wrote in 1931 that the total lack of arrests was “not
because there is anything secret or underhand about these murders,
but because the witnesses won’t talk.” Loyalty to the waterfront
code against “squealing” also marked the death of the
Brooklyn dock boss Red Donnelly, who, balehooked and shot in a
waterfront shanty, was asked the perfunctory policeman’s question
of who had killed him. “John Doe,” Red coughed out, and died
pure.
Even the celebrated crimefighter Thomas Dewey, whose racketbusting
exploits as Manhattan DA inspired a long- running radio
drama (Mister District Attorney), was beaten by the docks and its
infuriating code. After his agents secretly filmed longshoremen
passing “tribute” money at two Wall Street piers in 1941, they subpoenaed
two hundred of the men and shuttled them in buses to a
special screening of the surveillance movie, which failed to convince
many about testifying. As one asked, “Who the hell wants to
be a dead hero, mister?”
Arturo Piecoro began his three decades on the New York docks
in the last days of the “shape- up” system, when each freightbearing
vessel that entered the harbor was met by gangs of men,
many carrying curved iron hooks with which they would dig out the
stowed cargoes of lumber, coffee, copper ingots, or Egyptian cotton.
These hopefuls crowded together at the pierheads, hunching under
their caps and windbreakers in raw weather, waiting to be chosen
in an ancient ritual in which most would be sent home. The shapeup
was “a hit- and- miss thing unless you knew somebody,” Piecoro
told me at a Brooklyn coffee shop. “If you miss one shape, you
hurry down to the next pier. There’s another ship. You bullshit with
some guys, then go over. Three steady gangs would be called first;
then, if somebody was sick, you might have a chance.”
Those picked in the shape might work four or sixteen hours
while a particular ship remained in port; if they weren’t part of a
regular work gang, they could idle for a week around the piers or
waterfront bars, scanning the newspapers or pub chalkboards for
lists of incoming ships. When they worked, the longies, as they
called themselves, were at greatest risk down in the ship’s hold; but
up top, slings could slip and rain down heavy cargo loads on the
men working below. On Columbia Street in Brooklyn, the day’s
gangs were often sorted out between the hatch boss and hiring boss
before the shape- up whistle even sounded, which made the shapeup
itself a demoralizing formality. “Guys paid for jobs, but you
never saw it,” Piecoro told me. “They might turn up with something
on their hat, or behind their ear, but you never saw them do it. That
was all done before.”
When Jim Longhi brought his friend Arthur Miller down to
Columbia Street to show him a shape- up, the young playwright was
thoroughly shocked to see the men herded docilely together, “waiting
for the hiring boss, on whose arrival they surged forward and
formed in a semi circle to attract his pointing finger and the numbered
brass checks that guaranteed a job for the day,” Miller
remembered. On another visit he saw men “tearing at each other’s
hands” in “a frantic scramble” for the morning’s last few work
checks. “America, I thought, stopped at Columbia Street.”
So it seemed. “Mobsters and labor racketeers” controlled the
world’s largest port, Mike Johnson wrote in 1948—and they threatened
his life for saying it. The bolder pier heists included an entire
electrical generator gone missing and a vanished ten- ton shipment
of steel. Organized pilferage was so rampant, Johnson said, it
amounted to an unofficial national tax, made possible by wider corruption
in the longshore union and in the courts, the police department,
and Washington. The scandal he raised inspired Estes
Kefauver to put mobsters on national television and the filmmakers
Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan to create a controversial masterpiece.
That so many people now regard On the Waterfront as an
allegory for something else—the filmmakers’ own testifying to Congress
about communism—shows how much has been forgotten
about the criminal reality of the docks Mike Johnson exposed.
As Johnson would learn, the “waterfront jungle” was by no
means a clear extension of the New York it encircled. It was a city
apart, with its own bosses, language, and codes, bankers, soldiers
and even martyrs, a frontier all its own.
Table of Contents
Map xiii
Preface: Who Wants to Be a Dead Hero? xv
1 "Dov'è Panto? " 1
2 Stirring Up the Animals 17
3 Broad Daylight 31
4 Johnny Shot Me 45
5 King Joe 55
6 The Big Story 63
7 They'd Never Kill a Reporter 69
8 The Leech and the Thug 79
9 A Lousy Buck 85
10 A Cup of Coffee 93
11 Meet the Boys 101
12 Above the Fold 109
13 Just Strangers 115
14 Communists and Newsmen 121
15 The Peacemaker 127
16 Our Wit's end 133
17 To Speak Without Fear 139
18 The Meeting of Minds 145
19 They Kill in the Dark 151
20 Out of the Woods 155
21 Talk or Fry 159
22 Last Round 167
23 A Cheap Town 177
24 The Crime Show 183
25 Learning the Score 191
26 Wings of Purity 199
27 Twilight 213
Epilogue Saint Peter 219
Notes 233
Acknowledgments 245
Index 251